To Do CPA Affiliate Marketing or Not – That is the Question

I get a ton of emails asking me how to get started in the world of affiliate marketing, and whether its a good idea to do so.

I tell these people the truth, affiliate marketing is a very, very hard thing to do. It’s extremely stressful, it’s super risky so unless they can handle stress like a day trader, have money they can afford to lose it’s worth it to join the battle.

I say battle because affiliate marketing is about battling failure after failure – learning something new in the process each and every time, eventually striking a winning campaign. A winning campaign that isn’t forever, it might run for 1 month, 2 months, maybe 4 months before it does due to many external factors. Product life cycle, increase in competition, bad reviews, offer dying, new regulation just to name a few potential ‘campaign killers’

When I answer with the above, then people say ‘But I want to be free, and just run traffic!” Well, there’s no such thing as just running traffic and winning all the time. Affiliate marketing is not instagram glam where everything is perfect.

To those who just want to quit their 9-5 and be there own boss, I recommend building a skill. Then getting a job as a freelancer or better yet creating your own service based business. These type of opportunities don’t require a lot of stress, you don’t have to lose sleep over them, and most importantly you don’t need to lose/invest a lot of money in learning as usually the profit is guaranteed – you do the job, you get paid (sometimes even before you do the job).

How to build skills you can then harness to make money online?

Well there’s always Youtube, tons of free information out there I rely on always to learn new skills from how to charge a car battery to how to create liquid tables in CSS. It’s quite vast.

If you are looking for most of a ‘classroom’ style approach, with modules you can go through step by step then you can pick up awesome skills by buying courses for like $5-20 bucks on sites like Skillshare and Udemy. Their courses are really good for building new skill sets.

How to promote your new service style business?

I have 4 major service businesses I’ve started many, many years ago – Content Pimp, Banners&Landers, Anglesaurus and Transey. The eldest turns 12 years old this November. Yes it’s been in business generating profits each month for 12 years now. Well over the “If your business doesn’t survive the first 6 months or 2 years (I can’t remember exactly which one people say more), it will die” phrase you often hear with offline businesses. My companies all survived more than 2 years in biz; heck my blog too even though someone really, really wanted it to fail and kept saying “most bloggers quit and don’t make it beyond 2 years” LOL yea well, maybe most – not iAmAttila. This person didn’t realize I did not start this blog to make money, I created it to help people and enjoy my hobby of copy writing.

Anyways if you are wondering how I built all these businesses from $0 spend on marketing? COMMUNITY! Join forums, groups on Facebook, start helping people, and they will start asking if you can do stuff for them and they’ll be happy to pay. If you do a great job, they will start recommending you to their friends and acquaintances.

It will snow ball from there, don’t do things just to make millions, always think about making $1 and giving a lot of value in the process – rest will follow. (A concept 9/10 people simply fail to grasp; hell most affiliate ‘friends’ won’t help you if they see you are down, because they are selfish pricks)